| TORONTO — A non-Jewish Canadian actor was so shocked by what she saw at Auschwitz that she is the author and the star of a taut drama she hopes will awaken young Canadians to what happened during the Holocaust. "Those enormous piles of shoes and clothing of the victims burned into my brain" said Samantha Swan, the London-born playwright of Star one of the 83 plays and 600 productions in the Fringe Festival. which ended July 13. Star is a resourceful and well written play about Isaac and Lili, a Toronto survivor couple who go back to Berlin to search out Stella (Samantha Swan), a Jewish artist's model who denounced fellow Jews, and find out what motivated her heinous acts. In the end, only Lili, who at one time was her best friend, confronts Stella about her involvement in Lili's mother's being taken by the Gestapo. But it is a hollow victory, as narcissistic Stella, who once dreamed of being another Marlene Dietrich, denies any wrongdoing, underlining the banality of evil. Isaac, a pubescent idolizer of Stella (he attended the same school), who still dreams about her svelte figure, does not even bother to see her in the flesh, though he ferreted out her Berlin address. En- amored with "the trivia of the Third Reich" as Lili puts it, Isaac says. "I don't need to see her, I just need to ask the questions." What alarms this writer is that up to press time, not one of the three Toronto dailies had written even a line, in the reams of Fringe material, in advance, or in review, about Star, a first-rate play. Is the Holocaust no longer of interest to them? Star is the first production of Cygnet Theatre Company and the ensemble acting of Swan, Gloria Saesura, Athena Reich, Robert Fulton and Giles Hodge does the new group proud —as does its di- rection by Swan's husband, Christo- pher Comrie. All the actors except Swan play several other roles. The effortless scene changes are done in seconds so that the tension never lets up. With her blonde hair and Aryan good looks, Swan makes a con- vincing plump artist's model and her scene with Reich, when the two young girls fantasize about Dietrich, is a gem. At curtain, Reich sings a Hebrew folk song about pain and survival. When her husband finished his work on a film in Budapest in 1992, the couple, who were married in 1991, visited Poland and Auschwitz on a holiday, where the idea for Star was born. |
| Visit to Auschwitz prompts Canadian to create play |
| THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS |
| July 17, 1997 |
| By BEN ROSE Staff Reporter |
| Samantha Swan |
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